Author's Note: Well, as should be pretty obvious once you start, this isn't written about Ink. I needed a bit of a break, so I bring you Ellisandre. Knowing some about Bug City and Chicago will help in understanding this, so the first part might be a bit confusing, but as I go on, hopefully I'll bring a little more explanation.

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Chicago Containment Zone. February, 2056

The doctor and her patient sat in the tiny, rundown house. The doctor would have thought it abandoned, except that apparently the man she had just finished stitching up had made this into his current…accommodations would probably be slightly generous. What it lacked in cleanliness, it made up for in privacy. She was tired, dirty and desperately wanted to go find the current, very temporary place she would call home for the night. Warren, though apparently all his friends had called him War, looked pale and in pain. There wasn’t much she could do for him now. They had entered wait and see territory, and she had no intention of waiting. At this moment he could fend for himself.

Wiping her hands up she stood, looking over her handiwork with a critical eye, doing a physical exam, and then astral for good measure. “You’ll live,” she proclaimed and wrapped the sutures on his leg, anticipating that he wouldn’t stay down for long even though he should. “Keep it clean, keep an eye out for infection.” Her patient stared at her somewhat blankly. Drawing a sigh from her and she rubbed at one of the stains on her hands. At least he didn’t have a blood disease, so she could afford to forego gloves for her protection. She stood and turned away, picking up her pack and the assault rifle that he hadn’t even noticed she had.

Warren reached out for her hand and missed, falling slightly to the side and catching himself on one forearm, groaning at the pain. “Wait,” he blurted out, and seemed a little surprised when he suddenly found his eyes met by the pale, frosty blue gaze of the elf. She had been all business, not ungentle and clearly skilled, but she’d collected her fee before working on his leg. What she asked for hadn’t been unfair, and, in fact, it was even generously low. “What happens if I get an infection?”

Leaning against the doorway of the cramped bedroom, she pinched the bridge of her nose, and dropped her chin to her chest, the ragged line of her dark hair falling obscuring her face. “Then you pray for some antibiotics,” she replied shortly. The past months had done a number on her bedside manner, demolishing it completely. “I’d sell you some, but I’m out. If it’s bad enough, you’d need IV antibiotics, also something I’m out of, and you might lose the leg.” She couldn’t muster sympathy when the man before her turned dead white, simply stating, “It’s better than losing your life.” The statement didn’t help his pallor.

“Stay until I’m better,” Warren blurted. She had found him under awful conditions, and an infection seemed most likely to happen. “Please. I have medical supplies, and I can pay you. It shouldn’t be long.” He offered a weak smile, knowing that his desperation put him in a place of weakness, if she chose to negotiate. “I’m a fast healer.” The small, slender elf stood still for a moment, staring at him as though she could see straight into his soul, before unslinging her pack once more.

“I have my choice of all your medical supplies. All of them, if I choose,” she stipulated, putting down her assault rifle. “And three boxes of rounds, whatever you have, assault rifle if you can manage it. I won’t insult you by voicing, further than this, what will happen if you try anything…untoward.” She stated with a flat expression, her tone level and matter of fact. “I’ll do everything I can to make sure you live through the next three days, limbs intact. At that point, we’ll reconnoiter.”

It was, again, a generously low price since, after all, how much was his life worth to him? After he agreed, Warren watched her strip out of her jacket and armor, the loss of the protective layers leaving her much smaller seeming, practically tiny. She was short for an elf, and very slender besides. A stiff breeze could send her flying, by the looks of her. With a hint of automaticity, she tucked a braided chain of orangeish gold and silver into her shirt, a pair of dog tags clinking on it as they disappeared.

An hour later and they’d eaten. They started playing card games. An hour after that and Warren found himself talking to her about…hell, everything. The pain meds she’d given him, light though they may be, loosened his tongue, on top of the dearth of company he’d experienced over the last several months. He’d already told her a lot, when he thought he was going to die. In spite of her normal silence, or perhaps because of it, she made an excellent listener. Things came out that he hadn’t said in years, stories that he would have kept silent under other circumstances, but what did it matter anymore?

Another hour, and perhaps more, after that, they descended into silence, the only talking to facilitate the card game. Warren watched the doctor, and she watched the cards. Finally, he asked the question he’d been thinking since before she’d even started suturing him. “So what’s a gal like you doing in a place like this?” The light words made her head snap up, her eyebrows drawing together above her cool blue eyes as she tried to decipher exactly what he meant by that. “I don’t even know your name,” he pointed out.

“Frost,” she replied with a little sigh. Warren couldn’t help a little snort, thinking that the moniker fit her perfectly, given her icy eyes and pale white skin. She looked at him blankly and added, “really, that’s my name. Dr. Ellisandre Frost, at your service.” One corner of her mouth pulled down and she added, “you can call me Elle.”

“Warren Alston. Pleased to meet you,” he answered, and held his hand out to the woman. They shook, as if they were meeting over coffee and he hadn’t been bleeding all over when she stumbled across him, she hadn’t stitched him up, and he hadn’t paid her to play nursemaid. It was an appallingly normal exchange, made surreal by the circumstances they found themselves in. “But seriously, why’re you out here? Trained physician and a magician to boot. Anyone would take you in a heartbeat.”

Elle shot him a censuring look and rather calmly knocked, signaling the end to this hand of cards. She was kicking his ass at gin rummy, but then, she’d been doing better in every game they played. When they resolved the scoring, she finally asked, as if her long pause wasn’t admission enough, “what makes you think I’m a magician?”

“The orichalcum necklace was a tip off.” Warren had worked with enough mages to recognize the precious metal. It could have been stolen or looted, but why hold onto it if she had no use for it? It would sell for…a lot. “Not as much as the fact that the bullet hole in my chest ought to be completely fragged. Way worse than it is. Ascwinwotytsd, except I don’t think it’s going to be slowing me down so much.” Elle raised an eyebrow, silently expressing that apparently he was concerned enough to hire her to stay, after all. “Hey, better safe than sorry.” She nodded her acceptance of that statement, and they played the next hand in silence.

Then, as she dealt the next hand, she finally spoke again. “I’m not sure I see the fragging point, telling you,” she admitted, her tone saying it wasn’t anything personal. “I always figured there was power in stories, and histories. They give us something to remember fondly, or strive to return to, or run away from, if the need should arise. Our past successes give us hope and our past failures give us drive. But anymore?” Her smile was a more than little bleak, and her eyes hollow and haunted. “There’s no way up, no way out, and no way home. Drive’ll keep you alive, but I’m beginning to think we can give up on hope.”

With a little sigh she picked up her cards, fanning them in front of her. “But I’m wearying of anonymity and a story is worth another story I guess. So how I got here? Well, I guess…I might as well start from the beginning.”

“I was born into money,” Ellisandre started, her eyes steady as she watched Warren’s expression. He had attempted to keep his instinctive response to that under wraps – growing up poor can give one a moderate amount of distaste for the wealthy, after all. She didn’t seem particularly perturbed about that, but offered a faint smile. “Remember I work for a living, so it wasn’t an obscene amount, but we were comfortable and secure, and my parents could afford me gifts like foci and some moderate amount of bioware. I couldn’t afford this drek on DocWagon’s salary, but….”

She stopped talking and focused on playing for a moment, apparently out of the habit of talking much. “My father died shortly before I was born. A mugging gone awry and he was shot through the aorta. Bled out faster than anyone could expect to save him.” Without looking up from her cards she added, “no need to think any thoughts about the ‘poor little rich girl’ or anything of the sort.” Warren might have had a thought or two along those lines. “Mom met Nathan when I was two and married him when I was four and I got a big brother out of the deal, and later a little sister.”

Her lips curled into a faint, sad smile, her eyebrows drawing together. “She still missed my father, and loved him, in a way, even after she remarried. But she keeps…kept telling me that when you find someone special you’ll know. And that it doesn’t always last as long as you like and more often than not things get in the way, but you shouldn’t let opportunities pass if you can help it at all.” Her frown deepened and she seemed to be somewhere else, her eyes focused elsewhere. “Fragging right there’s things that inevitably get in the way and it’s always way too damn short,” she muttered under her breath and then shook her head hard as if to clear away the thoughts.

Her short, hacked off looking black hair fell a bit in her face and she automatically pushed it away. “Whatever,” she finished, her voice flat and inflectionless. Her tone became slightly lighter and a little more wistful when she finally began to talk again. As Warren kept silent, it wasn’t long before she started to ramble a little bit. The lack of conversation in her life was all too evident, but he felt no need to stop her. She let him do all the talking he needed. They finished the hand of cards, and didn’t deal another. “Nathan’s my dad, really. I never knew my father, and I have half his genes and his last name, but not much else. He was a good man, according to my mom, but….he was never there to tell me bedtime stories, or kiss my knees when I skinned them, or to give me advice on how to deal with boys.”

She offered another small, sad smile and shrugs slightly. “He was never a dad to me. I don’t have daddy issues because I did have one and I was so loved.” A melancholy expression of pure longing stole over her features and forced Warren to reconsider his estimation on her age. It always was so damn hard to tell with elves though. “Not to say that my childhood wasn’t without its troubles, but they were mostly small, even if they didn’t feel that way. I excelled in school and struggled in my social life. A product of skipping a lot of grades.”

A beautifully wrought ring of silver wolves encircled one of her fingers, garnets sparkling in their eyes, and she twisted it absently. “My Awakening was a dramatic and unexpected affair when I was fifteen, and it is between myself and my totem. It didn’t change my life as much as you might think.” Warren couldn’t help but raise his eyebrows in silent surprise, to which she shrugs. “I wanted to be a doctor from the time I knew what that was. Whether or not I had magic didn’t change that and since I had already completed my pre-college work I took a year off to learn to control my magical abilities and to gain the…knowledge to begin to self-direct.”

“I sped my way through college and received a pre-med degree with a minor in magical studies and comparative mythology. I graduated with honors and then went on to complete my medical degree by the time I was twenty-two. When I completed my residency I was twenty-four.” A definite tone of pride flavored her words and her bearing, but defeat and exhaustion kept the emotion mostly buried for all its honesty. “For all that, it’s hard to be such a young doctor. Nobody wants to be treated by a baby, and I had issues commanding much authority. For other reasons I…decided that my talents would be best suited in High Threat Response.

“My totem does not lend itself to being one of the great healers, but I’m too stubborn to back down from a challenge I take on. Shamans do not give up their lives or their individual goals and hopes in service of their totem. He chose me and if I wasn’t suited, it would have been another.” She traced the scar along her left forearm, the jagged mark raised, red and slightly puffy against her pale white skin. “It is a totem of battle though, so it turned out that I took to the training with the same ease with which I tackled most of my schooling.”

“Three intense months later I completed the appropriate training and was shoved, green as can be, into a well-established team. It was fondly referred to as Jace’s Angels among the hospital, and it had…a reputation.” With a quiet, raspy chuckle, the first laughter of any kind Warren had heard out of Elle, she lowered her eyes and then let out a gusty sigh. “Needless to say they weren’t particularly pleased at the time.”

“Jace’s Angels got its name from the leader of the team, Jace Hyde, and their nearly miraculous record. With a rate of recovery far greater than normal, and near fearlessness, they were pretty much a legend in the hospital, and the other DocWagon facilities in Chicago.” She leaned back and stretched her neck with slow motions, grimacing slightly to herself. “They’d recently lost the shaman who’d been working with the group and, at the same time, lost one of the medical specialists. That is, of course, where I came in.”

“Coming into a group like that…it’s hard at the best of times. I was overawed and unsure, and Christ I was young. I was almost twenty-five. Some of them didn’t understand why I, a licensed doctor wanted to get my hands dirty and risk my life.” Warren looked an awful lot like he wasn’t sure why she would either. “It wasn’t about thrill seeking, although some of them thought that. They assumed I just wanted to have some good stories to tell and would quit when I found out that there wasn’t tons of glamor to be had, and didn’t take me especially seriously because they didn’t think I’d stick around.”

Noting that the light filtering through the blinds had already started to dim, Elle excused herself. Not at all hindered by the darkness, she stood and moved about the small house. She returned with more food if you could call the normal soy-based fare food, and handed some over to Warren, along with a bottle of water and a pill. “For the pain,” she explained, watching him down it and nodding in approval.

Warren leaned back in the bed, watching her eat sparsely. Elle picked at her food, and he wanted to say something, noting the sharpness of her cheekbones, and the boniness of her wrists. It wasn’t his place, and he couldn’t blame her for finding the food that’s available unpalatable and unappetizing. Instead, he ventured a suggestion she continue. “You were talking about your team?”

“Ivonne Ballin was the only dedicated medical specialist, and the first to really accept me,” she explained between tiny nibbling bites. “We respected each other’s ability. I had greater background knowledge and training, and she could do any field procedure under fire and hardly break a sweat. Years of experience can do that.” Elle dug in a pocket and pulled out a worn and creased picture, holding it out to Warren. “Ivonne’s the petite brunette next to me.”

He looked over the picture, a group of seven posed on the roof of what’s probably a hospital, given the medical helicopter in the background. They wore the standard uniform for DocWagon High Threat Response. It was a motley looking group, and his eyes immediately picked out Elle. She stood slightly behind and beside two smaller women. Her hair was longer and obviously professionally cut, and she was looking down at the dwarf woman in front of her. She was pretty when she smiled, and looked good laughing. The CZ had changed her, but it had changed everyone. The thin human woman beside her with short cropped brown hair looked amused and slightly perplexed.

“Zippy, well, Tasha McDonald, was our rigger. She’s the dwarf there. Always good for a laugh and an off-kilter and inappropriate joke,” Elle gestured vaguely towards the picture and the red haired dwarf woman. She looked rather smug in the picture, apparently responsible for Elle’s laughter. “She enjoyed speeding and was absolutely fearless. Which is sometimes for the best…at least, we never had to worry about her balking when she saw where we had to go.”

“Delano Barnes otherwise known as Del or Big D was the first of our three muscle men.” Warren easily identified him in the picture: the massive, muscle bound ork stood behind Elle and to the side in the picture with his arms crossed and his face frozen mid eye roll. “He scared the drek out of me when I first started. He had a mean temper, but I can’t fault him for that since it never interfered with our job and duties. No one ever explained to me how he got those burn scars on his face, and I never asked.” With an expression of faint hurt and resignation she sighed and added, “Guess I’ll never know.”

As she peered at the photo, Warren watched her eyes carefully. That cold blue gaze skittered across the tall elf that stood beside Elle and instead focused on the human that flanked him. A man that looked average in every aspect, he could easily disappear into any crowd and people would forget him for an instant. His face was blank, his eyes fixed straight ahead. “That’s Harry,” she said softly. “Harrison Mullins, but he’d picked up the name Longshot before he started working for DocWagon. He and Jace went way back, and they started working for HTR at the same time. Rumor had it that they’d once been ‘Runners, but no one could say why they started working on the up and up though.”

That left only the unidentified male elf. By elimination, Warren identified him as Jace. Tall and corded with lean muscle, there was a dangerous edge to him that wasn’t dampened even by the fact that the picture caught him in the midst of laughter. “I first saw Jace not too long after I started my residency. I must’ve been twenty-three and I immediately joined the swarms of women employed in the hospital who wanted him. Scarred and hard, the man oozed charisma,” Elle admitted with no hint of embarrassment or modesty. It was easy for Warren to picture. The handsome face combined with that hint of danger did tend to have that effect on women.

“And that was us. We were actually undermanned, but we were still the best.” Warren studied the picture for a moment before offering it back to Elle. She replaced it in the pocket from which it’d been withdrawn and then rubbed a hand over her face. “To their credit when I proved my worth they accepted me without question, which fortunately didn’t take long. They were family, and they accepted me. On duty we’d spend the entire time together, eating, sleeping, and waiting. By each other’s skills our patients would live or die, and we might too.”

As if warding away a headache, Elle rubbed slow circles at her temples. “Off the clock we spent a lot of time together too. It’s hard to make very many friends when you spend days on end on call at a hospital. I found the work rewarding, and…” she trails off and looks away, crossing her arms and leaning further back in her chair. Warren noticed that he was getting drowsy, but he did his best to keep his focus on Elle when she started to speak once more. “When I had started, I never intended to stay in HTR forever. I was committed to doing the job, and doing it well, but it wasn’t meant to be a life long…after two years, I didn't know what else I would want to do, and I didn’t want to leave the family I’d made. I had developed a reputation of my own, even within the team, of competence and skill.

“I was really, really happy. Not that everything in my life was perfect.” With a short bit of wry laughter she explained, “Where I would have complained would be my love life. Ultimately, the long hours and the fact that I wound up closest with Jace out of all of the team didn’t lend itself well to dating. So I had a few short lived relationships, and otherwise focused on spending time with the team and my family. My big brother had a daughter during my last year of medical school, and I spent a lot of time with her. So even though the distinct lack of romance was disappointing, it did nothing to diminish my content.”

After a long pause, Elle stood haltingly, her muscles stiff and exhausted, and looked over Warren. “You probably ought to sleep,” she said softly. “And I do as well.” She placed more water and another pill on the table beside the mattress he rested on. “Take this if you need to, and yell – quietly, mind you – if you need me. I hope you sleep well.” She snagged the rifle she’d discarded and disappeared into the other room without another word, leaving Warren in darkness and silence.

Warren slept late. While not something he did frequently, in the face of his near death experience the other day he thought it could be excused. When he awoke he lay still for a time, thinking about the woman he could hear moving in the other rooms. The pain of his wounds gnawed at him, increasing slowly, but the man put off taking the pill that lay on the table beside him. He also pondered everything else he was responsible for, the commitments he had to keep, and what he had to do to continue to survive as well as how his injuries affected that, but mostly he thought about the doctor.

Part of him couldn’t fathom why she prowled the streets and contended with them alone…and yet, he could see it. No one would have turned her away, not with her impressive resume of skills and abilities, but that clearly wasn’t the main deciding factor. The hollow look of defeat and loss in her eyes told a clear story, one that she seemed willing to detail. A stab of fire in his leg drove him to the pill, gulping it down. It clouded his senses and dulled his mind, but the pain was worse.

Before too much time passed, Elle walked into the room with more food. She inquired after his health as he ate, and began to change the dressings on his wounds. Her manner was brusque, but her hands unfailingly gentle. She spoke as she inspected the wounds, apparently having warmed to the task of story telling, at least a little. “On August 22nd we were on duty. It was horrible.” The emphasis on the last word spoke volumes, and she choked on it as though all of the horror, all of the sorrow of that day were crammed into that single word. “I’ve been on the scene of disasters. I’ve been with the first responders to terrorist attacks. In some ways, this was…worse.”

She swallowed hard and her hands stilled as she was tucking the edges of the bandage in. “It wasn’t that we had to leave people behind, I’ve had to do that before. It wasn’t even the brutality of what I saw. One of the terrorist attacks…it was a mall, and the perp liked to put anticoagulants in his bombs. There was so much blood there…” Her eyes went unfocused as she loses herself in the memories, and then she blinked once, twice, and finished her work, sitting back.

“It was the uncertainty. We didn’t know what was going on, and while I glimpsed…things on the astral plane, it was too fast for me to get a good look and we didn’t actually see any bugs. It wasn’t just the bugs at that point, you know. People panicked and this made them do stupid things. One man shot his entire family and then himself out of fear – his daughter survived. The tension and uncertainty just drove him over the edge. Some of the clients we picked up raved about the things they saw, but most of them were DOA, and I had never seen some of the wounds. I didn’t know what could cause them, because I’d never thought to consider mandibles that big as a possible cause.

“There was talk of rotating me off the teams in the emergency as they were short doctors – some of the staff was missing – and my specialty was in emergency medicine. I refused to leave the team without magical backup….” With a snort of derision, she bared her teeth in a faintly canine expression. “No one was organized enough to gainsay me.” In a whisper she adds, “I wouldn’t be trapped here, if I’d volunteered. I…don’t know that I would have done anything differently.”

She shut her eyes against the memory with a sigh. “I knew something was so very wrong, but nobody would tell us anything, not really. Rumors ran rampant. I blocked them out and focused on my job.” Slowly she opened her eyes and stared at her hands, barely seeming to see them. With measured strokes of her fingers she rubbed at the stains on her hands. “And I prayed for when I could go home, sleep, then take a bath long enough to wash the day from my skin.” With a slow shaking breath she pressed her fingers to her lips. “Thirty-six hours in, we were informed we were making a special pickup. We…weren’t supposed to be going out. Even in an emergency, response personnel are cycled back to do triage as…well, it’s an attempt to keep us from snapping or committing mistakes that the corp would be liable for.”

Elle’s jaw clenched and she looked away from Warren. “DocWagon was supposed to be grounded at that point, and we’d be flying straight into a quarantine. Not that we knew that explicitly at that point. I don’t know what specifically was said to Jace, but he was going because he had to, and we followed him. The client’s life signs were stable, and we were to wait until dark and go in near silent.” Warren read the anger in her posture, and could sympathize. She got fragged, plain and simple, but he couldn’t help but think that she should have expected it, working for a corp. It might not be a fair sentiment, he reflected.

“We decked ourselves out for hell. Extra ammo, extra portable medical supplies, hell, we even scrounged up some survival gear. I brought my foci, all of them, not something I often did. Jace was afraid, and I’d never seen him that way…I was almost as close to him as Harry, closer in some ways, and only the two of us knew how scared Jace was.” She looked back at Warren, and it occurred to him that she had probably never told this story before. Her eyes were wide and she pressed the tips of her fingers to her lips, a bloodless look to her.

“That flight in the Osprey was…the worst I’d ever been in. Ivonne and I clutched each other’s hands and prayed to our respective deities. She’s catholic and I asked my totem for strength and protection for my pack. It was a bumpy ride as Zippy was trying to keep us silent as possible, and unnoticed. What I didn’t realize then is how lucky we were not to get zapped out of the sky by some military drekheads. Of course, we weren’t trying to get out…

“I was just beginning to think that we might be okay when something hit the windshield and latched on. Zippy freaked out and it was doing a remarkable job of ripping its way through bullet proof glass to get to her…to us…” Elle rubbed at her eyes, the dark circles beneath them pronounced against her pale skin. Warren thought he could catch a glimpse of guilt in her eyes before she shut them and spread her fingers over her brow. “We crashed. It killed the wasp, I thought, but now I think it’s more likely it just stunned it. It also killed Zippy though…. The rest of us were bruised, and Ivonne broke her wrist. I found out when I hauled her away from Zippy. She was still trying to save her, but I knew….”

Behind her lids Elle could still visualize the hurt and betrayed look on Ivonne’s face when she’d hauled the other woman from their friend. She could feel the sting in her cheek when Ivonne had slapped her with a hand that wasn’t right, and then screamed in pain. Without asking, Elle had reached out and grabbed that hand, pulling power through her and into that wrist, visualizing it whole and hale as she sang, the powerful, eerie song of her totem filling her voice as she focused it. She’d forced it to health, and then dragged Ivonne, shaking with emotion, from the twisted wreck without breaking contact. Around them Jace, Harry and Big D salvaged and unloaded items from the Osprey. She continued to channel the healing magic through her and out with every heartbeat and breath, focusing on maintaining the spell as it knit together bone and muscle.

“We took what we could, and then went to go find somewhere as safe as possible to hole up until dawn. We would help who we could, but we would exercise caution. All of us wanted one thing: to make it home alive.” Elle shifted in her seat, wrapping her arms about herself for comfort. “Someone screamed, in a back alley, and Ivonne just…snapped. The hell that had been the last few days and the loss of Zippy…it took a toll on her better judgment, on all of ours. She ran into the dark alone, without another thought. Within seconds she was screaming, and by the time we got there a fragging thing was gnawing on her corpse.”

She groped for words for a moment, mouth opening and closing before she inhaled deeply. “It was only afterwards that I realized it was a giant beetle. My brain couldn’t put it together at the time, yeah? I mean, I’ve been to the metaplanes, I’ve seen some unbelievable things, but I never expected to see a beetle that big on this plane. At the time I did the only reasonable thing, and struck it dead.” She looked at her hands, remembering how she’d formed several bolts of pure mana and launched them into the shiny carapace. As she excelled at that sort of spell, the beetle had been shredded, and she’d been left with a massive headache as she had overdone it.

“The rest of the trek went by in a blur, and Jace eventually led us to an unmarked clinic in the third floor of a building. Jace had made a point of knowing every damn clinic in the area. It was abandoned, and Harry and Big D swept the place, and then we set up watch in the waiting room. I was…in shock. Harry and Big D went to go get some sleep, and Jace stayed up with me. I sat on the floor and watched the firefly spirits display for the first time. I had not a fragging clue what they were, but they were beautiful and I cried.”

A heavy sigh gusted past Elle’s lips and she let her head tip back. “There’s a myth that tears are a sign of weakness, a failure in control. Ivonne and I were the criers on the team, when things got really rough, and she always said that they were the great cleanser. That they’d wash out the pain and poison from the wounds in our hearts and minds, gradually and slowly. The failure of control is about when you cry, but there is no shame in the act of crying itself.”

Her voice was exhausted and she looked haggard, the lines of her face sharp with chronic exhaustion as she continued to speak. “I lost two sisters, in the space of thirty minutes. So I wept, hard and bitterly, and I didn’t even realize when Jace was there, cradling me against his chest and telling me things would be okay. Four of the six of us were still living and we would see each other through. He would see me home to my mother and my father, to my sister and my brother’s family. To my little niece Evangeline who was turning four in three months and desperately had wanted me to be there for her party. Nothing would hurt me, and he knew in his heart that I would keep them all safe as well.

“I knew they were nothing but comforting lies then, and so did he. They served their purpose and when I cried myself out and started to fall asleep in his arms, both of us knew that I would face the dawn, even if it hurt.” Elle rose and pointed back to the other room. “I found the medical supplies, I ought to go sort through them,” she said and excused herself quietly.

Except for when she came to check on him and bring him food, water, or hand over a pill or two, Warren didn’t see Elle until it was evening again. They ate dinner in a silence Warren found himself growing accustomed too and finally she relaxed in her chair. “We raided the clinic for everything portable that would become…important. I directed them in choosing the items that would be most critical in an emergency, and also would be the most costly for people to acquire,” Elle began again suddenly, the abrupt break in the silence making Warren start slightly. “We tried to reach out to our facility and see what the frag was going on. The resounding and repeated silence told us what we’d feared. We were being left here. So, we chose a direction, avoiding major roads and corridors as much as we could.

“We had a very simple goal, to get home, and an also exceedingly simple second one, to help who we could on our way out. It was motivated in large part by my decisions, but no one was going to argue with me. We had certain skills, and let me tell you, the pay for HTR teams isn’t good enough to make you want to do it for the money.” She shivered slightly, walking out to the other room without explanation and then returning wrapped in a blanket.

“No matter what we did it was dangerous. With bugs and rioters and looters, psychos who took the sudden lack of law enforcement as an invitation to do anything, and everything else, there was so much…damage.” Her voice was harsh and bitter when she continued, the tone of a woman who reached the end of her skills and abilities, and found herself lacking. “So many people died under my hands that day…so many I couldn’t save and every single one was terrible. Knowing that…knowing that what I’ve done is not enough, and I can’t save the people I’ve set out to….”

Her expression was bleak and somber as she stated quietly, “It’s not that I am unused to death, it was even then a reality to me. People have mistaken my sorrow over the loss of my patients for weakness.” Warren decided that he would most certainly not make that mistake. “I am not some bleeding hearted weakling. I have killed before.” With a look of defeat she leaned back, explaining in quiet terms, “I hate it. I hate having to, but I have. I’d like to say that all of the instances were because I had to, because I had no choice, but…” Warren could easily read the look in her eyes. The one that questioned if she’d pulled the trigger because she had to or because she wanted to. “The first people I killed in the CZ were the looters who accidentally shot Harry through the throat that evening.”

Warren noted the slight tremble in Elle’s normally steady hands where they held the blanket about her. “He had taken point and it was an accident. Sheer, stupid bad luck for us. For them too. It went through a weak point in his armor, and there wasn’t anything I could do. They dropped their weapons cheap drek, as soon as Jace and Big D sighted them. Cheap pistols and clubs in the face of assault weapons….” Her lips thinned and she shook her head. “When I realized nothing I could do could save him, I lost control. I was already in sorry shape from the exertions of the day, and even though I know better, I can’t help but think that if I had been at my best or even close to, I would’ve been able to save him. I don’t remember exactly what I did, but the drain…”

The way she wouldn’t look at him told Warren that she was lying when she talked about her lack of memory. He felt no need to push her though. “I woke up in the apartment they’d chosen for the night to Jace cleaning the blood off my face. Bloody nose and I bit my lip when I fell after I passed out.” Her fingers toyed with her rings, and there was a distinct look of shame in her eyes. “Jace didn’t want to tell me what happened, but I forced it from him.” Warren reconsidered whether she was lying, and thought that perhaps she didn’t know herself. “I started crying again. Big D got this horrified expression, and looked to Jace, who gave him the nod. He squeezed my shoulder and fled, leaving me to Jace.” Warren stirred, uncomfortable with even the idea of dealing with a woman in tears and completely sympathetic with the large ork. He would’ve run too.

“It was the same as the night before. The same words then, all full of false hope and inadequate comfort. Jace tried, and it soothed me, but I was growing much too battered for anything but a warm, safe bed and lots of hot tea to even start to cure.” A faint smile and a vague hint of humor crossed over her face, and Warren could see how this battered, melancholy woman could be beautiful. “And perhaps some sex. Adrenaline does odd things to you. Of course, thinking that made me just cry harder. I’d been seeing a guy before.” Elle didn’t need to specify before what. “I don’t know if he’s alive or dead, if he’d been at his apartment, he might be okay. If he’d been caught at work….” She didn’t need to elaborate there either.

“Jace despised him, but he was sweet and cute and smart. Jace never really liked the people I dated, but it wasn’t his place to say anything. We had a complicated friendship.” She thinned her lips and ran her hand over her eyes. “It wasn’t perfect, but it was something, and ooooh I really wanted to love Michel. That did nothing to diminish the fact that I still found Jace gorgeous.” Elle treated Warren to a self-deprecating smile. “Like I said, complicated.” She fell silent for a long while, long enough for Warren to register that he felt feverish, but he didn’t feel the need to say anything, particularly when she started to speak again.

“Adrenaline’s an odd thing,” she repeated, “and having your life in constant peril as well as those that you care for beyond measure does funky things. It can make you want to reaffirm the fact that you are alive and living and breathing…which is how I wound up curled in Jace’s lap, his arms about me and our lips locked.” A faint flush spread over her cheeks and she covered her mouth with one hand. Her voice dropped to a whisper as she murmured the confession, eyes shut at the force of the memory. “And god it was good. I’ve never had better kisses. I worry that I will be forever comparing others to his, to the kisses of a now-dead man. I’m getting ahead of myself and I know it. I don’t see that there will be much in the way of others.

“We made love on the floor, his hand clasped over my mouth to keep me quite so as not to wake Del and it was amazing. I wanted him since I saw him, and…I knew he wanted me. There’d been a drunken, almost kiss a year back, and we’d both agreed that for the sake of professionalism we wouldn’t….” She opened her eyes and dropped her hand, gesturing around the room, throwing in a sardonic, “well, frag professionalism. If we made it out alive, the remaining three of us were done.”

Elle’s fingers spread at her chest, rubbing lightly over her heart as she frowned, considering her next words carefully. Warren leaned more heavily into the pillows propping him up, awaiting the continuation. “When we learned more about what was happening, the CZ…. Del and I deferred to Jace implicitly. Jace had the standard pedigree of a runner, I think. Life on the streets, then some time in gangs, then getting chromed…and where he deviated from the standard is when he chose to join HTR.”

Warren smirked in understanding with a faint, amused snort and a nod. That was the abbreviated version of his experience too. “We did the best we could, that first week. We moved from place to place constantly, trying to find an exit we didn’t think would exist. On the way, I’d help who I could. I set broken bones, stitched wounds, treated no small number of concussions, and did everything I possibly could to help those we could find. It made for a slow pace.

“Del did his best to acquire us goods and items, or to scout an area. Particularly if I was engaged in business efforts, they didn’t like to leave me alone.” Her lips curled up a little in faint amusement. “If I ever mentioned it to them, they would deny it, but some of it was because I was the one remaining woman. They didn’t mean anything insulting by it - both knew that I could take care of myself in a fight, but…both of them had much more experience surviving on the streets.

“Not to mention I was the greatest asset they had. I was protection from the bugs, as much as anything could be, and doctor all in one…and there is a distinct lack of doctors around. But it mattered to them that I was the smallest, and I was the only woman.” Elle didn’t seem disturbed by her soft proclamation. Warren looked her over thoughtfully, taking in her delicate, aristocratic features, and her thin form. She looked fragile and weak, but he knew better. That didn’t mean he couldn’t understand the desire to protect her, and he was acutely aware from her tone and her demeanor that she had consented to be protected. He had seen her fierce when she, single handedly, chased off his assailants.

“A week and a half after,” she swallowed hard, but didn’t stop talking. “We….lost Big D. It was near where Volksville is now, and we knew it wasn’t bugs. I’d gotten good at recognizing the signs, we all had, and they were…still more interested in hauling people off than in killing them.” Her blue eyes were huge as she continued, sorrowful and torn. “It’s funny.” It was distinctly not, and her tone said everything, but Warren didn’t correct her. “The bugs are the one thing we can all agree need to be dealt with and exactly how they should be.” She raised one hand, fingers cocked like a gun and mimed shooting something, for all that Warren and Elle knew quite well that firearms would do jack against the bug spirits. Still, he agreed with the sentiment. “But I continue to be shocked at the depravities and cruelties that people shower upon each other.

“Some Humanis slitches, probably Volk now, killed Del and then mutilated his body. If what they did wasn’t clue enough, the anti-metahuman rhetoric and slurs sprayed above his corpse would have been clue enough. I had been…recovering from the strain of attempting to reattach a girl’s leg and wasn’t in any shape to move.” She looked down in something close to shame. “We still shouldn’t have let him go alone…” Those, Warren recognized, were the words of a woman consumed by guilt, who couldn’t have done anything different.

“Something in it changed how Jace went about things with me, but it changed nothing between us, or in what we ultimately were trying to do. We wanted to survive, and go home. We spent almost every moment together, unwilling to be separated anymore. Together, we could watch each other’s backs, and….” By the look in her eyes alone, Warren understood. They loved each other, even if it was the hell and high emotions that made them feel it. “He began to teach me, obsessively. When we weren’t moving, working, or sleeping, he drilled me full of information and then every fighting technique he knew.”

Elle shifted uncomfortably and wrapped her arms and the blanket much tighter about her. “I began to suspect, and then more than suspect, that he was anticipating his death. He was trying to give me the best possible chance I had. I…learned swiftly, which I always did, and in some ways I resented why he was teaching me, but there was nothing I could, or would, say.” For a long time she was silent, and then she dug into her drop pouch, pulling out a pill, this one individually wrapped. “But I knew he was right.” She placed it before Warren deliberately. “Take this and get some sleep. I’ll catch you in the morning.”

He took it, and fell quickly into an uneasy, and then feverish sleep. Fevered, flame ridden dreams nipped at him, and a sharp pain brewed in his chest. He awoke, hours later or maybe just minutes, sweaty and gasping, to long cold fingers spreading on his forehead. “You’ve got an infection, and a bullet fragment is still in you, Warren. I need to operate. I’m going to sterilize the room, and then put you under,” Elle’s calm, steady voice told him. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

She began to sing, a low, slow melody that spoke of wild things, still winter nights, and pine forests. A thread of eerie, haunting wolfsong joined her melody, lonely and bereft as only one voice was lifted to the image of the moon her song conjured into his mind’s eye. A weird prickling feeling swept over his skin and he peeled his eyes open enough to catch a glimpse of her face. In place of the features he had grown used to, Warren was faced with the countenance of a regal, pure white wolf, its eyes staring at him with the pale blue hue of Elle’s. Its lips curled, revealing large, pearly white teeth, and everything went black.

Ellisandre Frost leaned back into the bedside chair with a low groan. She had just finished cleaning the blood from her hands and she cursed her patient’s cyberware. She wouldn’t have missed the shard of metal in the first place if not for the excess amounts of chrome in the man. At least it had been a relatively small incision, and then she had used her magic to burn the infection from him, her spell racing through his veins like a cleansing fire. So now she sat in the dark room, her legs stretched out before her.

In Warren’s kitchenette she found a surprisingly high quality rocks glass, and poured herself a large portion of the utterly awful vodka she kept more for medical purposes than for anything else. Hell knew she needed a drink, and she, in this instance, helped herself. A sudden spasm of pain shot through her chest, localized about her heart, and she grimaced, reaching up a hand to rub discontentedly at her chest over her sternum. Broken heart syndrome, her analytical, medically trained mind supplied to her not for the first time. It was the physical symptom of the stress and loss that had ravaged her life for the last months.

A memory of medical school was easily conjured up, and she grimaced as she took a drink of unforgiving liquor. Sitting in a study group, the odd disorder had come up and one of her classmates had laughed and declared, “now that is yet another reason why I won’t be having any of that love nonsense. Can you imagine?” Amidst the laughter, agreement, disagreement, and joking that had followed, Elle had kept silent, keeping to herself that she could not wait to fall in love. “Foolish little girl,” she whispered into the darkened room, and shook her head.

When she was young, she had a deep and abiding romantic streak, a very private thing, but one that existed nonetheless. She had been many things as a child. Serious, driven, and bright, the large number of fights she had been party to came as a surprise to everyone, and had led to no small number of lectures. They were born out of a fierce belief in justice and an unquestioning loyalty to the few friends she had, and there had only been a few. Her intelligence made it hard to connect with people her age, and she had skipped through school at a rapid pace meaning she was always young. Small as an adult, she had been small as a child, her compatriots even had the advantage of age, and she had approached all those squabbles with a single motto: “You might be bigger, but I’m much smarter.” She approached everything with a level of determination that appealed to her totem, and she committed herself wholeheartedly to each thing as well.

While she hunted and fought in a way that many would not recognize at first, but Elle had approached her education as yet another hunt, and surgery as a different sort of fight. Of course, she had learned to be quite an effective warrior in the conventional sense as well. Another twinge of her heart drove her to yet another long drink, the vodka burning all the way down. The dog tags hanging beneath her shirt grazed her hand and she caught them and the fabric over them in her fingers, clutching them with a gusty sigh. She missed them, mind and soul, and quite literally heart as well. Elle knew that the only cure now would be rest, and it had played into why she chose to stay here at all.

She and Jace had always left their patients to the devices of their kin or companions and, if they did not have those, to their own. After the first time a small band of misfits had attempted to kidnap the doctor, it made the pair rather wary. Elle still remembered the look on Jace’s face the first time he’d been asked how much it would take for him to be willing to sell her. It made disappearing as quickly as they appeared and not setting up shop anywhere a much, much better proposition.

Elle knocked back some more vodka, but even the harsh burn of it, strong enough to make her eyes water, couldn’t keep her from thinking the simple thought that while she missed all of them, she missed Jace the most. Reminiscing was torturous, but it was all she had. She couldn’t help it, and couldn’t resist it. Her fingers caught on the ragged line of her hair and she sighed.

Long hair could be a hazard, and she always wore it braided and pinned on duty. In the first month in the CZ, she and Jace developed a ritual. Every morning he would braid her hair before dawn, not that the sun shone much in the CZ, and they would talk in hushed voices. She would discuss magical theory and what she understood of what was going on in terms of the magical clime of the Zone and he would instruct her on survival on the streets among many other things. At night, he would unbraid her hair and comb it out in a silence often interrupted only by her tears and his soft murmurs of comfort. She cried so much as the days and evenings eroded many things inside of her. It left her bitter and hard edged, and when her hair was bound up she muscled through all of it.

At night, when Jace’s strong, scarred fingers unwound her hair it was a release from having to be strong. With her hair unbound, she was released, and she could simply be her. A young woman facing the darkness, but at least she wasn’t alone. In the darkness she and Jace would seek comfort in each other’s arms, craving the emotional comfort in the act just as much as the physical. He would kiss the tears from her cheeks and eyes as he held her to him, and she memorized every scar on his skin as she relaxed in the safety of his arms. They would make love with a desperate yearning for stability and hope. Afterwards they would lie together, on the hard floor of wherever they sought shelter or the unfamiliar bed of the apartment or home Jace broke them into though Elle never liked those. She could practically feel the ghosts of the previous inhabitants chiding her for taking what was not hers.

He would stroke her hair, allowing the long, silken strands to slip through his fingers. When she decided that it was too hard to keep it clean, he cut it for her very reluctantly, and they both had grieved it, honestly. Hair would grow back, but what it symbolized, the point that they had reached, would not change for a long time. While Jace had done serviceable, but not beautiful work, the current hack job she sported was her own work. She might have steady, skilled hands, but she couldn’t cut her own hair worth a damn.

They never said it, but they loved each other dearly and fiercely. Elle cringed and bared her teeth at another, slightly sharper pang, knowing that she brought them on herself and digging her fingers against her ribs and sternum. It was an unspoken truth between them, one that rang clear in every touch, every soft word, and the desperate way Jace instructed her and the even more desperate way she fought for his health. It was, perhaps, clearest in the nights few and far between, when the ravage and ruin of the day had been too much for him and Elle awoke to his near silent tears. She would sleepily push herself up and reach out to him, crawling into his lap and showering his face with gentle kisses. The fact that he allowed her to comfort him at all….the CZ changed them both.

They agreed without ever discussing that words of love were something to be saved for home. Home. Such a small little word, and such a big, important thing. Elle stared at Warren’s face for a moment, studying it. She never had answered him, in truth. Certainly not the implied question of why the frag wasn’t she in one of the, relatively, safe refuges the havens offered. The reasons had started off based in the fact that to join such a place, it would curtail their attempts to find a way out. There was the very real possibility that, if she walked into such a place and was honest, Elle would be highly discouraged from leaving, and both she and Jace were growing paranoid. Now it was a matter of guilt and the raw places inside her. She didn’t want to get attached, and Elle wondered, painfully, that if she had talked Jace into going to one of the havens – Wrigley Dome, probably – would he still be alive? If she had considered it more, would he have?

She tortured herself with the ifs, and felt she deserved every bit of agony it left her. She had done her best, and that had been insufficient. The avatar of her totem had been conspicuously absent from her life as of late, and Elle suspected that he would forgive her failure, a more rational, reasonable part of herself knew that and would as well…but she could not. There were many things she knew, one of which being she would be safer in a group, but battered and damaged she couldn’t face that. A lone wolf is a sad thing, Elle thought to herself, her mental voice acerbic and biting.

So sad and alone, Elle drank the rest of the vodka in terse mental silence, listening to Warren’s steady breathing. Eventually she drifted off into sleep where she sat, her dreams troubled and disturbed, and sometimes incredibly wistful.

When Warren opened his eyes, bleary and hurting to find Elle at his bedside. A soon as she caught his dazed eyes, she leaned forward, pressing a pill into his hands and a bottle of water. “Welcome back,” she murmured and attempted to smile at him. Elle was already well aware that her bedside manner left something to be desire, but he seemed to relax then, and did as she instructed. In simple terms she explained what had happened. “It will be more than a week before you’re fully healed…” She watched Warren grimace. “And I will stay.”

He looked relieved and grateful, and part of Elle wanted to point out that she wasn’t doing it for his sake. She needed to rest. Her heart hurt, literally, and though she didn’t want to admit her weakness to anyone, she had run herself ragged. Here she could rest. She didn’t need to scavenge for food and to barter with those who swarmed the supply drops. As much as it pained her to admit, and admit she did because she was honest, even to herself, Elle also appreciated his company. But she didn’t tell him because it meant nothing.

They attempted to play cards again to pass the time, but found that Warren’s somewhat more impaired state this time made that impossible. Instead, he leaned back and asked the question that Elle knew was coming, and still dreaded. “So what happened to Jace then?” He looked somewhat mollified at her stricken expression, but did not rescind the question particularly when she nodded and leaned back with a sigh.

“I cried a lot, particularly at the start. I’d never been one to bottle my emotions, but I also hadn’t been much of a weeper. I guess I simply hadn’t had much to cry about, and the Zone gives you more than a little.” She bit her lip and stated slowly, “I cried less and less, the decrease in tears correlating with the decline in Jace’s health.”

Elle spread her fingers over her heart as she talked, massaging lightly. “It began slowly. Barely noticeable at first, but I could see every injury chip away at Jace little by little. Each one engendered another and me? I was helpless against them. I did everything I could. I poured myself into those spells and the metal lacing his bones sapped the strength of each one. We broke into abandoned clinics, now and again, and I did my best, but neither of us were comfortable staying long in one place. Both of us…rightly so or not, feared what would happen if I set foot in a hospital or still open medical facility. I would not be caged.” There was a hint of steel in her voice when she said that, a hardness in her eyes that spoke volumes to Warren, and answered some questions.

“But the true decline began with an ant spirit, two weeks in. It mangled his left leg. Between surgery and magic, I saved it, but I couldn’t heal it completely. He limped after that. Not as bad as I had feared, and more when he was tired…. “ She heaved a sigh and shook her head. “Frag, it slowed him anyway. A week later he took a nasty cut to his ribs that I just couldn’t heal all the way either. Got infected, and I burned the bacteria and fever out of him, but only barely.”

Elle lifted her free hand and began to tick off her fingers, listing a litany of abuse that made Warren wince in sympathy. “His wrist broken in a fight with a heavy who thought to jump us while we were sleeping. I’m still learning to be a light sleeper. It never was important before, but fortunately, “ her grimace added a silent ‘or not’, “I have so many problems sleeping now it’s moot. A knife in the back in a fight with me unconscious from drain and exhaustion. I’d passed out after trying to help a couple we met…the woman was giving birth, and I couldn’t save her or the baby...” Her eyes got a far away look, and Warren cringed for her.

“A gang leader making a mad dash for a position as a warlord decided that he wanted a doctor for keeps instead of paying us. His flunkies knocked me out in one go – I never saw the tranq patch coming – and tried to kill Jace. He made a hole in the group, grabbed me and ran. I woke up to us stashed in god knows where with the worst possible sanitation and myself covered in Jace’s blood and the sound of him trying to close the wound on his chest himself.” She pressed her palm a little harder and shut her eyes. “Somewhere Jace began a mantra with me, drilling in some basic truths and information. Ultimately…it doesn’t bare repeating anymore.” Warren, at least, could picture what it might sound like.

“The onslaught continued. I picked up a few war wounds of my own, but Jace took the brunt of the abuse.” He supposed the scar on her forearm was one of them, and wondered about the story behind it, but he didn’t push. “There was a roach, and a mosquito, but mostly it was people. This fragging place was killing him. I watched it happen. I could see it in how he moved, and when he wouldn’t notice me touch him because he had his pain editor on so damn much. I could see it in his chrome-laced aura as every injury lost more of him.” She bit off the last bitter word and fell into one of the silences Warren was becoming used to.

With a heavy sigh and a look of absolute, exhausted sorrow, she pressed her hand even harder over her heart. Elle realized that this was the first time she’d ever spoken of it out loud, and realized, from his look of patience and complete sympathy, that Warren knew it as well. “I lost Jace…over a month ago…” she began haltingly. After a hard swallow, she forced the words to come out more smoothly, but not at all quickly. “He took a burst of automatic fire for me. Too slow to get us both out of the way, so instead he just shielded me.” Her fingers pressed to her lips as she continued, her eyes staring sightlessly into space. “I can taste his blood on my lips still and I can feel the jerk of his body as the bullets ripped into him….and then I went berserk.”

Elle could still picture it, the disassociated feeling as she watched her power rip the group of armed men apart even as she paid the price for it, and it had been a heavy price. In that moment, she would have given anything not to be trapped in the killing rage, and she could not stop. “They were dead in seconds, and I crawled back to Jace, hurting from the drain and the knowledge….

“There was no saving him. I tried and I failed. I couldn’t even grasp the tiniest bit of mana, and he was far past what I could do without magic. He stopped me when as I tried to cast again which broke my heart, but I was never in the habit of disobeying Jace.” It was all too easy to remember that exact moment. She still had blood trickling from her nose, and her voice was hoarse, breaking completely when his hand caught hers as she began the ritual gestures once more. He had shook his head slowly, his voice gurgling and rough as he told her no, not again.

“So I kissed his bloody lips and told him I loved him. Then I curled up against him as he bled to death and cried.” Elle felt the prickle of tears at her eyes, but didn’t care that they remained there, unshed but certainly not unnoticed. “He told me he loved me too. Just before the last.” After a period of silence, her next words came out in that same slow, deliberate pace. “I laid there for hours, and then stripped him of what I could use or bear to sell. I took his dog tags and then I burned his body. I’ve been alone since.”

Warren reached out and laid his hand gently over Elle’s, his eyes solemn and understanding as they met hers. “I am sorry for your loss.”

“You could stay, if you wanted,” Warren told Elle, not for the first time, as she removed the sutures in his chest. He sat patiently on the couch in the tiny living room as she worked, attempting not to fidget anxiously. A clean bill of health after a week of careful oversight would be a welcome thing. Over the last week and more that she’d been there the fact that she could stay had come up, of course. She had even considered it seriously, he offered her a part in his business venture of sorts, and the protection of having a partner again. He did not expect a different answer, but he felt compelled to extend the offer once more.

“You know I won’t,” she replied softly, accompanying it with one of her gentle, sad smiles. He expected nothing different, and simply nodded. Sitting back Elle looked Warren over with her observant, piercing gaze. He felt like she could see straight into his soul and reflected, with a slight smile, that she actually could. “Well, you get a clean bill of health from me,” she finally said, and turned away to begin to neatly and meticulously pack her gear. “It’s kind of you to offer all the same.”

Warren peered down at his chest, finding the wound well on its way to cleanly healed, the flesh pink and tender, but otherwise hale. Even with the additional incision for the second surgery, she had done an amazing job and, as they had already settled accounts, done it for a steal. “Christ, you really are an angel,” he exhaled and then cringed at the words he chose to express his gratitude.

Elle, for her part, simply looked over her shoulder with that same sad smile, shaking her head. “And this is a far cry from heaven,” were her gentle words of admonishment and a strange sort of admission. It made the hairs at the nape of Warren’s neck prickle with the soft implications in her tone.

“Are you sure?” he asked for the last time, pushing himself up from the sofa and offering Elle a hand when she went to rise. It was foolish to ask the same futile question, but he couldn’t resist. She had the feel of someone who was giving up, and perhaps he underestimated her will to live, but he didn’t want to see the beautiful, sorrowful shaman dead. There was no way he could replace those she lost, but he could offer her friendship that she would not take.

She placed her hand in his, accepting the assistance in rising, and shouldered her bag. Her only response was a nod, and a slight squeeze of his hand. Then, almost abruptly as she arrived, Ellisandre Frost walked out the door and disappeared from Warren Alston’s life.

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